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Although I am not a KM buff, I discovered today that Swarming is a very interesting concept in KM(via Smart Mobs. There is a programming paradigm similar to this - Swarm programming, what my friend Selvinseems to be doing.
Much has been talked about the Reliance way of management. Not having figured that out from the day I joined, I often wondered how such a huge company with all its internal chaos, petty squabbles and inflated egos manages to keep posting profits year after year, blowing away all myths and defying all market predictions.
What am I talking about? Why am I relating Swarming with Reliance's management? I swear there seems to be a relation between the two. Here are some of my observations (Well, even if you don't give a damn about Reliance) »
To understand Swarming, better read the seminar notes. To get a quick idea, let us take an analogy (not an example), I quote from these seminar notes -
A bank in Bangladesh provides an example. There was a massive problem with debt repayment and an investigation was launched into the patterns of repayment including a profile of the kind of person likely to default and the adequacy of controls and checks and so on. More and more questionnaires and employee guidelines were produced but the problem refused to go away. The reason was that the situation was being treated as merely complicated instead of complex. In fact the more rules were introduced into the system the easier it became to default. Eventually someone found the solution. Anybody could have a loan provided four other members of the village took out a loan at the same time and they all guaranteed each others loans. In retrospect the solution seems obvious. A person knows others in his or her village in a way no bank manager can know them. Each person has respect and social obligations in the village and would be ashamed to default. Nobody is going to support another in taking out a loan unless they really believe it will be repaid. Simple intervention produced dramatic results. One of the ways in which a complex process is detected is by reviewing the solution. In retrospect the solution often makes rather obvious sense but we could never have predicted it in advance. Rationalisation in retrospect is like the difference between understanding in a Newtonian type paradigm in which three dimensional space is absolute and understanding in one which is multidimensional and relative.
Whether or not in the context of KM, it makes absolute sense for a big organisation to use swarming as a means of management. There is more of action-based research. Do something, note the response and modify accordingly. That's exactly the principle of swarming. Using retrospection rather than prediction to improve.
The notes also outline seven sins of knowledge management. When I went through them, it struck me immediately that most of these might apply to Reliance as well -
- That knowledge can be managed - We always know more than we can tell and we can always tell more than we can write down. They know this and hence haven't invested heavily in KM systems. They know that KM is very organic in nature. They know that people are the best KM systems ever.
- That organisations can be 'designed' - Try to start journeys rather than aim for goals. Infocomm was never designed to be what it is today. I know you are not going to believe this. How can such big dreams take shape without a specific goal? How did Infocomm manage to achieve so much without a goal? If you were to believe me, the 60,000 kms of optic fibre was laid primarily not for CDMA/WLL but for Cable TV / Internet / ISP services. During the journey, a more successful and money churning proposition was thought of - communication for the masses.
- Utilitarianism - This is the belief that everything an agent does in a community or organisation is based on the expectation of a 'return'. In most economic theory all transactions are in terms of financial value. Not true in case of Reliance. Reliance runs more like IBM, tribal in nature. It consists of tribes and shadow networks which support each other.
- A belief in Utopia - Never does Reliance have perfectionist tendencies. Conventional value judgements never have any place. They are happy with the fact that something is working.
- A belief in 'best practice' - The norm is take 'best practices', read them but do not rely on them. Make your own path. Most glaring example being the Jamnagar project. Existing best practices were sidelined and new best practices were created in the process of building the largest refinery in Asia in record time, lesser than that used for building other smaller refineries elsewhere in the world. Swarming was prominently used there. Same is the case now with Infocomm.
- The organisation is merely a collection of individuals - To quote the report fully on this point, it is often manifested in the belief that if you optimise each individuals operation the organisation will be optimised as a consequence. This is an entirely false view of the way people interact and the kind of patterns that emerge from those interactions. Managing people to achieve individual goals is only useful if as agents they are defined as unalterable parts of an operation and that they work utterly independently. In reality working in an organisation involves internal and external relationships, the boundaries of which are sometimes rigid, sometimes loose and sometimes constantly fluctuating. This needs no explanation. Reliance doesn't care too much if a particular individual does not produce adequate output. But if the team has a reduced output, there is something to worry.
These are but some points that got my attention. I noted these observations from my experience. This may not necessarily reflect others' observations or experiences with Reliance. Oh, and if you weren't exactly excited by this, you will definitely get excited by the use of reputation systems at IBM. Quoting the seminar notes again -
IBM employees work in different countries and often from home using the computer. There are few rules as far as 'virtual' collaboration and to date there are 75,000 of these collaboration clubs and some 55 formal ones. So this 'shadow community' is one in which people are self organising and creating vast tracts of knowledge that the company could never hope to manage formally. In fact individuals sometimes do not wish to collaborate formally for fear that their ideas will be taken by those they do not know and who will give them no credit. When forced to do so they will often resort to 'camouflage'.
Because IBM would neither wish to nor be able to manage all the 'spaces' and 'boundaries' of such groups they use a process which has been dubbed 'just in time knowledge management'. The company has created structures which enable it to call up and move information across boundaries on a 'just in time' basis. This started more or less accidentally when it was 'flagged' that a virtual 'teamroom', including David Snowden in the UK were working on 'story' - the use of narrative to pass on knowledge or expertise. Once it was put out that a report was in progress and any information would be welcome there was a number of e mails from people interested which became a flood when an article was published in the Harvard Business Review. Although David was about to write what would have been a very sizable report the questions in the discourse enabled him to focus on what was really relevant and at what level of abstraction.
IBM now have a search engine called 'tacit' that can trawl the 'team rooms' on the intranet and pick up any key words that might give a clue to information on any current problem that they have. An e-mail is then sent requesting help and a task force can be quickly assembled. But privacy is respected in that only key words and not text are picked up. Also whether a person responds is up to them. If for example you are looking for an expert on 'story' you may not pick up David Snowden's but he gets informed that you are looking. If he knows that you are a person that's likely to steal his ideas he doesn't respond. If you're someone that he knows and trusts then he might phone. In a bureaucratic organisation the thief would prosper but in this kind of 'shadow' system he or she gets starved of the access to knowledge on which the exploitation depends.
Source - Orginal article Swarming, KM and Reliance from Nilesh's weblog
About the author:
Nilesh is working with Infosys in the infosec field. In his spare time, Nilesh does photography and maintains his weblog at nilesh.org/weblog. In addition to being a gadget freak, he is excited about emerging web technologies and constantly experiments whenever he gets that bit of extra time.